Scottish Christian.com

Home > News > Scottish Christian News Monitor

Messiah has spoken as vocal group scoop top award

The Edinburgh-based vocal group the Dunedin Consort yesterday hit the heights of their 11-year career when they won a coveted Gramophone Record of the Year award for their recording of Handel's Messiah, writes Michael Tumelty.

The Dunedin Consort's triumph yesterday was an all-Scottish affair, as their recording of the Messiah, released late last year, features not only the 12 singers of the consort, with their co-founder and co-artistic director, soprano Susan Hamilton, but conductor, keyboard player and fellow director John Butt, a world authority on baroque music and Gardiner, professor of music at Glasgow University.

And while the Gramophone Award is a first for the Dunedins, it is also a first for Glasgow-based recording company Linn Records, whose esteemed producer Philip Hobbs both engineered and produced the recording.

Success doesn't come cheap. The Messiah recording, made in Greyfriars Kirk, carried a price tag of around £50,000 that, not so long ago, would have been prohibitive to the small vocal group. So the Dunedins came up with an initiative of sheer enterprise.

"We came up with the idea of running a public subscription to raise money," said Hamilton. "We priced every movement, and people purchased their favourite movement and got their names into the programme booklet as subscribers. The response was incredibly impressive and we raised over half the money that way."

Full story at The Herald.